Bold design chosen for Ground Zero

Breaking news: New WTC plan is taller than twin towers. A complex of angular buildings and a 1,776-foot spire designed by architect Daniel Libeskind was chosen as the plan for the World Trade Center site on Wednesday, The Associated Press has learned.

This is magnificent news. I've admired the Libeskind entry from the beginning.

Engineers feared shuttle wing burn

Breaking news from CNN.com: One day before the Columbia disaster, senior engineers raised concerns the shuttle could be lost during re-entry.

A virtual march on DC

NY Times: The switchboard on Capitol Hill was swamped today as antiwar protesters conducted what they called the first "virtual march" on Washington. Some 32 groups were involved, including the National Council of Churches, the N.A.A.C.P., the Sierra Club, the National Organization for Women and MoveOn.

Great news. I mentioned Moveon's plans for the political action against invading Iraq last Friday.

MSNBC tries to out-Fox Fox

What the hell is up at MSNBC? Are they trying to out-Fox Fox?

First they go out and hire the hate-mongering Michael Savage, who loathes Latinos, women and gays. (PBS' NOW recently carried a segment on Savage.) Now comes word that MSNBC is hiring Dick Armey, the neo-fascist former House Majority Leader whose politics are somewhere to the right of Dick Cheney or Attila the Hun (take your pick).

I don't blame them for dumping Phil Donahue (I blame them for hiring him in the first place), whose brand of washed-out, predictable, politically correct namby-pamby liberalism is a sad spectacle to watch (not that anyone watched his show).

But is this the answer? Puh-leeze. Here's another network I won't bother tuning in to.

The emergence of breaking-news multimedia

Steve Outing's latest in E&P: Breaking-news multimedia: not an oxymoron. Writes Steve in his email newsletter:

Breaking-news multimedia isn't an oxymoron. It's the direction that the online-news industry is taking, particularly as broadband access becomes more common. I liken today's environment for multimedia news to the days of the first Macintosh, PageMaker software, and laser printers. That new technology got a lot of people designing self-published printed newsletters, but much of their work was not great -- until they gained experience. It's the same with multimedia today.

Detroit public radio station abandons streaming music

From Detroit's WDET web site:

DETROIT - February 24, 2003 - WDET 101.9FM Detroit Public Radio has temporarily suspended streaming its music programming on its website (wdetfm.org) today because of rules created by the recording industry limiting what music can be streamed. These rules designed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and approved by Congress dictate how stations must stream music by a particular artist within a certain amount of time. For example, a station is not allowed to play more than two songs in a row by the same artist, and not allowed to play more than four songs by the same artist within a three-hour period.

Sad. It's likely that other rules implemented last year also come into play, such as forcing stations to keep records of every song streamed during a Webcast.

Congress targets campus P2P

Declan in News.com: Congress targets P2P piracy on campus. Excerpt:

Members of the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees copyright law said at a hearing that peer-to-peer piracy was a crime under a 1997 federal law, but universities continued to treat file-swapping as a minor infraction of campus disciplinary codes.

"If on your campus you had an assault and battery or a murder, you'd
go down to the district attorney's office and deal with it that way,"
said Rep. William Jenkins, R-Tenn.

Uh, huh. Great analogy, from the great minds at work on this subject on Capitol Hill.

RSS for liberal art majors

Dave has a modest proposal: RSS for liberal art majors.

He's right that news aggregators haven't hit the mainstream yet. (Here's my recent story on the subject.) And it's cool that he's got a prototype up at Harvard to get it kick-started.

Blogrolling updates

In the past week I noticed a couple of blogs with a really cool feature: a real-time ability to tell you which weblog links have been updated in the past hour, two hours, six hours, etc.

Greg explained that it's a function of blogrolling.com, a little operation that stores your links to other blogs on its site and gives you a code you can place in your blog. You can snag one blogroll for free, or 10 for a minimum donation of $15 (which is what I did).

So, after about three hours of coding, cutting and pasting, I managed to add this functionality to virutally all the weblogs over there in the right nav. (Still working out the color kinks on some of these.)

I've asked the site operator, Jason, to send me a little bit of background on blogrolling.com, so I can share it with others, and I'll post that in the next day or so.

A quick word about the updating system: Jason's code wizardry (javascript is the route I chose here) basically snags the pings received by Weblogs.com whenever a weblog is updated. It then parses the data to whatever parameter you set (I chose every 6 hours rather than the too-frenetic every 20 minutes).

As Jason explains on his site:

Blog software packages like Movable Type, Blogger Pro, Radio and pMachine have built-in options for pinging weblogs.com to tell the site your blog has updated. LiveJournal and the free Blogger packages do not. If you would like to build your own software or do it manually please see the Weblogs.com Specs on how to do this.

A few other blogs, like the hand-built html of Projo's Subterranean Homepage News by Sheila Lennon, also lack this pinging capability. But most of the ones I check regularly seem to have it.

Personally, I think this is extremely cool, and hope it will be widely adopted by other bloggers in the coming months. See what one guy and some nifty code can do?

Blogging and big-j Journalism

Dave Winer talks with News.com today about early blogs, his move to Harvard for a fellowship there (only 10 blogs at Harvard? that can't include the student body, can it?), and how blogging is supplanting some of the roles traditionally performed by mainstream journalists.

It's a worthwhile read, of course, since Dave is one of the few bloggers who's a big thinker, a doer instead of just a pontificator, and a dang good writer.

Dave and I have had runarounds on the subject of journalism's role in the new media ecosystem, and it's clear that he's felt burned by a lot of press coverage in the past and that colors his perspective. (Just as the fact that I've worked in newsrooms for 20 years colors mine.)

So when Dave says ...

People now get the information from each other and for each other using Web logs. There are still professional journalists writing, but a lot less. Web logs are journalism. Have they had a big impact? Absolutely. When a big story hits, I don't necessarily trust the professional journalists to tell me what's going on. If I can get the Web logs from the people who were actually involved, I'll take that.

... I'll have to disagree ... and agree.

I agree that weblogs have changed the dynamic and balance of power in the media ecosystem. We're no longer passive recipients of fact and entertainment dished out by the establishment media. We're creators, producers, designers, publishers. Most bloggers have something worthwhile to say, and they find a ready audience for their niche or wide-ranging subject matter.

Too many newsrooms still share the caveman mindset that blogging is at best a lower form of journalism or that it's not journalism at all. It's a convenient stance, given the dire state of the news industry, but it's flat-out wrong.

At the same time, I think bloggers can be a little too self-satisfied and dismissive of the mainstream news media. In truth, it's a symbiotic relationship. As I've written about before, weblogs will supplement and complement, but not replace or displace, traditional media. When big news hits -- when war breaks out, a terrorism attack occurs, or even a neighborhood shooting -- you can bet the overwhelming majority of online readers will first turn to news media like CNN.com, MSNBC, nytimes.com, a local news site and other traditional sources -- and then turn to weblogs for discussion, dissection, interpretation, counter-arguments.

Weblogs need the traditional media, if only to play off against. In the years ahead, I think we'll see a richer interaction between the best parts of weblogging and the best parts of traditional news operations. It's been slow in coming, but the evidence is growing by the day that their futures are intertwined.

Despite their warts and all-too-evident shortcomings, newspaper and broadcast journalists still play an essential role in this democracy trying to keep us informed. That's what real journalism aims to do, regardless of the medium or the messenger.